This is a January story, a story that started in 2019 and ended on its last day. A New Year’s Eve Ball where she could have literally danced all night. Except, at midnight, she was bespelled and bitten and blessed. That first moonrise of 2020, the year the world fell apart, marked Beulah’s transition into a lovely but dangerous thing, and she was ecstatic.
Something circular happened in Beulah’s logic. She had been made vampire on Christmas Day of 2019. It took a year of wheedling and bribing and convincing, and when Gerard heard the first rumblings of the pandemic to come, the bite finally came.
So if the brain tumor had resurfaced, that imperfection would have doomed her chance at immortality. The super blood that was flowing in her veins now would not have cured that. One night, under a crystal cut sky, he relented.
After the allotted twenty eight hours, Beulah screamed. As soon as her mouth opened, Gerard’s sliced wrist poured in the sangra royale and she drank. When the shakes stopped and her eyes opened Gerard stood back and exclaimed:
“Goddess Rising!”
She felt young and old and powerful and connected to the rest of Gerard’s clan. They considered themselves gods, so she adopted the usage of their term for themselves, The Pantheon.
The next evening, he reluctantly explained as she opened her eyes:
“Here is how it all shifted. We immortals are living all over the world. Of course, there are members of the pantheon in China, one our kind a recluse, had dwelt in the province of Wu Han, in a cave no human ever entered. But humanity’s ceaseless incursions invaded even there, and the cave’s bat population was mercilessly captured. For our dear Xiao Erdz, it was a brutal end, unable to shapeshift in a cage, the poor man was summarily eaten. The other Chinese vampire immediately put out the word and we mourned the loss of one our wisest elders. At our best we are magical, eternal, gracious. Beulah, my darling, we are not meant to be eaten.”